Thursday, May 5, 2011

Assassination nation

Elizabeth Schulte describes the bone-chilling history of America's assassins in the aftermath of their latest--but certainly not their first--kill in the Middle East.

and ...

You can call it "regime change" or assassination or something else. It amounts to the same thing--in the name of upholding the empire, the U.S. government has never been afraid to use trained killers whose actions would shock the Mafia's Murder, Inc.

From this article, here's a partial list of US assassinations and attempts

Osama Bin Laden

Saddam Hussein

Muammar el-Qaddafi

Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnam)

Patrice Lumumba (Congo)

Fidel Castro

Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran)

Salvador Allende (Chile)

Sukarno (Indonesia)

Che Guevara

Jawaharlal Nehru (India)

Manuel Noriega (Panama)

This list is of course just the ones we know about. And, its also the list of people who are relatively famous. US death squad have been active in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade. And, they've mostly killed people Americans have never heard of. Back in the Vietnam era, the infamous Phoenix Program assassinated tens of thousands of Vietnamese.

Then of course, America is a strong believer in outsourcing jobs to foreigners. Allende is on the list, but how many other Chileans died from Pinochet's death squads and torturers? During the 1980's, there were death squads in the US allies in Central America, El Salvador notably, but also Honduras, Guatemala, and of course the Nicarguan contras. It's estimated that the CIA helped Indonesia kill approximately 1,000,000 people after the overthrow of Sukarno. The US government didn't seem to have any problem with Indonesian assassinations and killings in East Timor for years. And of course, back to Iraq, the Iraqi government always seems to have run their own death squads. There have been rumors of US special forces and aid to groups in Iran that lead to a wave of car bombings and killings there. And the US is always helpful to Israel in their attempts to kill and murder the people who live around then. How many have the paramilitaries in the US client state of Colombia killed?

Of course, in the midst of this, we can also look at these shores. Everything from the killings of Robert Kennedy to Martin Luther King to Fred Hampton. Environmental activist Judi Bari had a bomb placed in her car. If we look backwards, we see the KKK and anti-labor forces using violence and killing as part of their political agenda. They never found whichever American right-winger was sending anthrax in the wake of 9-11. There's a segment of American society today that believes in the assassination of abortion doctors. How many people do American police kill each year?

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